At 10:25 AM 12/30/2004 -0500, Judith Barer wrote:
...
>and we FTP the tables to the web site. When we FTp the tables we actually
>overwrite the live data tables that are being used on the web site. Until
>now this was good enough even though the data was not up to the minute. Now
>we would like to have our web site reflect the most current data. The first
>thought was to upload the data every night. This runs into complications
>like I don't really like the idea of overwriting live data and the data
...
Well, overwriting 'live' files is a tricky thing. I'd generally not
recommend that in any event. But I'm surprised the 'hosting' site
(developer) doesn't offer an extremely simple solution:
1) the files are FTP'd to a specific location (no - not overwriting the
existing files).
2) a VFP app sitting on the host server "watches" that location and then
loads the data as required.
With this approach, you could work out various options - e.g. send
everything every time, send just updates/mods, etc. Also, you could work
out a 'compression' approach - like zipping all the files into a single
.zip file - to speed transmission/improve timeliness. If you don't do the
everything-all-the-time approach, you could even work it out so that
updates could be sent from anywhere, multiple locations, at the same time, etc.
I'm not sure why the consultant is saying this is difficult to do... It
isn't a 5 minute design/setup - but it isn't a 5 hour design/setup either
(assuming we're really talking about a database here - e.g. records have
key values, etc).
Another nice thing with this approach is everything that is sent over could
be archived (another good reason to work out a compression scheme for
transmissions).
HTH,
-Charlie
©2004 colemanc (AT) acm D.OT org |
